Flood Aware – Flash Flood Warning System
Floods have major impacts on communities and infrastructure, causing restriction of movement, loss of property, and in the most severe cases even loss of life. Flash floods are defined as floods that occur within 6 hours of the start of rainfall. With flash flooding, a matter of minutes can be the difference between saving property or someone’s life, or not. The time critical nature of these floods makes the use of live data a key factor in early warning systems, and mitigation strategies.
The goal of the Floodaware model is to connect the different components of the Smart Stormwater Management project to provide a real-time system giving live updates, and predictions of flood dynamics. The system is made available to local government to improve planning and disaster mitigation capabilities.
The flooding model aims to improve prediction of flash floods and so enable better responses. The project started by involving the community through workshops and consultative sessions, so the citizens helped to identify their problems with the management of water.
Floodaware runs in GAMA (GIS Agent-based Modelling Architecture) using a layered approach, with water travelling down the layers as it transforms from rain, to floods flowing through the catchment. Each timestep the rain is sent from cloud polygons to their overlapping sub-catchments, an optimization technique is used taking advantage of the geometries of sub-catchments and clouds.
For access to this data, please contact the relevant Council.
